Titanfall 2 confirmed by Respawn boss

The worst kept secret in recent history has been officially outed by Vince Zampella, CEO of Respawn Entertainment. Titanfall 2 is now confirmed, and the franchise sheds its Microsoft exclusivity in the process.

Speaking with IGN, Vince Zampella said:

"I guess EA announced a sequel, so I could play coy and pretend I don't know anything about it, or… yeah. So we're working on a sequel. No official name yet, but we're working on that."

It should come as no surprise that Respawn, comprised of the team behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, were able to achieve widespread success with their first game. This came at the cost of hitting multiple platforms. In order to finance the game, Respawn signed a marketing deal with Microsoft and were provided with Windows Azure dedicated servers to run the game's multiplayer components.

When asked what Respawn would've changed about Titanfall's first outing, COO Dusty Welsh wasn't shy to bring up the issue of exclusivity. Zampella clarified that Titanfall may have not existed without Microsoft's backing: "Well, we needed that, though. We couldn't do the game." EA have previously hinted that Titanfall will be multiplatform, and these comments essentially confirm that the sequel will also hit PS4.

IGN pressed the Respawn boss on the potential nature of the Titanfall sequel. Vince essentially said that Respawn missed the mark with the game's story-driven multiplayer mode, which was too frenetic to sink in for many players (myself included).

"Maybe we could have mixed things up a bit better because some people blew right by it and didn't even see it because there was so much action happening around it. It's tough because if you hit people over the head with it it becomes intrusive, and there are people who don't want or care about it."

I think folding the single player into the multiplayer is potentially smart if they can get it right, but as Zampella says, the first iteration was a little too chaotic in practice.

I think having the maps like that in packs, it does split the community, and it makes it harder for matchmaking, it's messy.

Finally, Respawn agreed with criticisms about the game's gated approach to DLC map packs. Many popular multiplayer FPS games offer DLC map packs, it's a staple - but in doing so, they fragment the community in terms of who owns the maps and who doesn't. Zampella said that this won't happen again, and instead, Titanfall 2 would take a cue from Evolve's approach to map packs. "I think having the maps like that in packs, it does split the community, and it makes it harder for matchmaking, it's messy." To that end, all of Titanfall's DLC is now permanently free to anyone who purchased the game, regardless of platform. While the maps still appear in separate playlists, this should serve to put an end to some of the fragmentation.

Going multiplatform will help solidify Titanfall as a FPS staple, and could potentially grow to challenge Call of Duty's dominance of twitch multiplayer FPS. Many saw Advanced Warfare and its exo-suits and pseudo-mechs as a segway into Titanfall's sci-fi leanings. Hopefully the competition between the two franchises would lead to more innovation, something Call of Duty is increasingly criticised for lacking.

Titanfall 2 confirmed by Respawn boss

Seriously though, single-player campaigns are expensive and resource intensive, if you want that play CoD or BF, in the end, everyone ends up in Mutliplayer. What they need to do is get crazy and mix things up:

Allow for Titan hacking, so that you can take over an enemy Titan. *MIND BLOWN*

Create private Militia army - get a crew of grunts to follow you / protect you etc. AND you get to choose their weapons and tactics e.g. Offensive / Defensive / Flank / Brute Force / Titan take-down.

MORE WEAPONS MORE WEAPONS MORE WEAPONS, OH GOD PLEASE MORE WEAPONS!

Allow for bigger Maps with more PvP. 6v6 is fun, for sure - but let's ramp it up a litte.

More Titans - like with tank-style wheels for example (with a gun turret you can control), or one that can Hover / Fly. *Crazy*

I hated the single player story wrapped into the Multiplayer. Didn't get me to buy into the game. Plus the matchmaking was horrid. The multiplayer was unique and pretty fun. However, I got sick of it when I was consistently getting housed by a level 50 team against my below 10 level team. I hope the sequel does it better.

I agree that the live campaign was a problem for paying attention. However, they also just told the story from a terrible point and perspective, so it made it feel very aimless and detached. We knew nothing about the characters. We knew nothing about the war. The way I always describe it is that it's like a movie that's two and a half hours long, where you showed up an hour late and left an hour early. We got no introduction to the conflict or characters, and we got no resolution to either.

Respawn needs to give us background on the war, before anything else. They need to actually develop the characters with that. They then need to work on actually giving us a sense of accomplishment when we progress through the "story," rather than just leaving us to ignore a pointless cutscene while we wait to start the next match.

That's pretty common. If you stick with it, you get better fast. I was TERRIBLE when I started TF, now I am often the team MVP. There are some great YouTube videos that help with strategy and loadouts.

That would be a great idea, as they are certainly pushing the gaming agenda with windows 10, and they seem to be winning everyone over right now. In fact I was telling a few people I know about it, and the gaming aspects had them very excited indeed!

Respawn earned my respect. They delivered a great game that worked on launch and continued to update and support it with free content updates that changed the game completely. Titanfall 2 is a day one buy for me. That being said, I am sad it is no longer an exclusive as a primarily Xbox gamer and worry about the potential of not using azure servers.

Kinda worried about that too. If they DO go to EA for server infrastructure next time round, at least with Battlefield Hardline coming out soon, we'll get an idea of how much EA have improved things (referring to the Battlefield 4 / SimCity launch problems...)

You would think that the dedicated servers would allow them to expand gameplay further... Could there be a potential of Xbox using free dedicated Azure servers, and PS4 having to pay for a dedicated server?

I'm hoping they'll stick with azure, at least for the Xbox and PC, as it is definitely faster and more reliable. I think the CoD games run on azure on xbox, as the PS4 versions do not have dedicated servers, and you can tell :'(

have they spoken specifically on azure servers going forward? There is no technical reason I can think of for both the XBox1 and PS4 versions of TitanFall 2 to use azure. Respawn would just pay the elastic computing costs as they would with any other solution.